chameleons 99
says. Because the lizards often died on the
journey from Madagascar and the African con-
tinent to Western laboratories, early herpetol-
ogists could only guess at how live chameleons
worked. That yielded theories that seem laugh-
able now, he says: “It was once thought that the
chameleon tongue projected because it inflated
with air or filled with blood, like erectile tissue.”
Anderson studies chameleon feeding in in-
tricate detail. Using a camera that captures
3,000 frames a second, he turned 0.56 seconds
of a chameleon eating a cricket into a 28-second
instructional video on projection mechanics.
Stored in the lizard’s throat pouch is a tongue
bone surrounded by sheaths of elastic, collage-
nous tissue inside a tubular accelerator muscle.
When the chameleon spies an insect, it pro-
trudes its tongue from its mouth, and the mus-
cle contracts, squeezing the sheaths, which
shoot out as if spring-loaded. The tongue tip is
shaped so that it acts like a wet suction cup,
grabbing the prey. The tongue recoils; dinner
is served.
Scientists have more to learn about tongue
projection, Anderson says. His research sug-
gests that in some chameleons, it may go even
farther and faster than previously thought.
The understanding of chameleon coloration
Madagascar’s chameleons can be as tiny as Brookesia micra, its body less than an inch
long, and as large as a two-foot-long Oustalet’s chameleon, seen here by baobab trees.